Yale president to step down after 20 years

Yale University President Richard Levin will step down at the end of the academic year after 20 years at the helm of the Ivy League school.

Richard C. Levin, president and Frederick William Beinecke professor of economics, Yale University, speaks at the Asia Society luncheon, in Hong Kong on May 9, 2012. Levin presented a talk on his views on what caused the 2008 global financial crisis, what could have prevented it and what the US government could have responded to mitigate the adverse affects on the economy. (ANTONY DICKSON/AFP/Getty Images)

Yale University President Richard Levin will step down at the end of the academic year after 20 years at the helm of the Ivy League school.

Levin, 65, has been Yale's president since 1993 and has served at the New Haven university longer than any other current Ivy League president, noted Reuters. As president, he oversaw Yale's largest building and renovation program since the 1930s and started the expansion of the university's financial aid programs.

"It is a source of great satisfaction to leave Yale in much stronger condition — academically, physically, and financially — than it was when I began in 1993," Levin said, according to Reuters.

Yale is expected to undertake a nationwide search for a successor, who will take the helm of the $3 billion-a-year operating budget university next summer, reported The New York Times. Levin said he simply felt it was time to move on and that he planned to take a one-year sabbatical to write a book.

"Rick Levin is simply one of the world's great leaders," Yale trustee Indra Nooyi, chief executive of PepsiCo, said in a statement, according to the Associated Press. "He has been transformational in envisioning how a university should be a leading citizen in its home community and he has boldly staked out how the leading universities should become global institutions. His example has been a guide for how universities around the world can have a much greater impact."